Thanks for all these suggestions. Unfortunately, nothing has helped.

I actually took the PLE disk I've been using and installed it on an older computer running win2k, and it works fine. So, the data is good.
I've installed it over and over again on my Dell Inspiron 8500 running WinXP Professional, with the lates drivers and it still won't display information in the following dialogues: create>Nurbs>Cube>options...Nurbs>Sphere,>options Create>Poly.>cube>options...>sphere>cylinder>optio ns, etc.
or Duplicate>options.
There are others. I noticed in the tech forum somebody had this problem, but their solution was upgradeing to XP Pro from XP Home. Any other ideas? This is killing me!